Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - You Reap What You Sow

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March 11, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

13:58

You Reap What You Sow

Everyone is so politically naive. Islander #3: https://shop.lotuseaters.com/

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	They say that a week is a long time in politics, and never has that been more true than right now.
	Over the past five days, things have gone kind of wild with the Reform Party in Britain.
	And a lot of scales have fallen from a lot of people's eyes because it seems there's been a repeated pattern of really bad behavior on the part of the leadership of the Reform Party.
	So for anyone who doesn't know, Rupert Lowe, the good Reform MP, or at least he was, came out and did an interview with the Daily Mail and just explained that, look, maybe the Reform Party needs to have something akin to a sort of hypothetical front bench.
	So there are spokespersons for each kind of thing that the government is expected to do.
	So reform will look like a government in waiting rather than looking like a party built around a messiah in Nigel Farage.
	And then things went south.
	Isabel Oakshot, Richard Tys's girlfriend, decided to go on talk TV and smirk about how naive Rupert was, thinking that he would dare be able to criticise Nigel Farage in public without any consequences.
	And my God, there's daggers in their smiles, isn't there?
	Really sweet, isn't it?
	Poor little Rupert.
	He's quite new at politics.
	He's really new in the House of Commons.
	And, you know, this is what happens to people who are amateurs at politics and they become MPs and suddenly they think, yay, look at me.
	I think I could be prime minister.
	They all do it.
	Bless him.
	The next day, we found out that Rupert Lowe had been reported to the police by his own party on charges of bullying people in his office, Zia Yousaf and apparently some Labour MP, three months ago.
	Why the Labour MP had sat on it for three months is anyone's guess, but we can pretty much assume that the reason that reform itself sat on these allegations for three months is because Elon Musk didn't think Nigel Farage was the guy who should be leading reform and in fact supported Rupert Lowe.
	And from that point onward, it seems that Rupert Lowe was a marked man.
	Then the smear machine began, but Rupert Lowe got ahead of all of this and said, look, there are people inside reform who are briefing the press to let them know that I have early onset dementia or that I have behavioral problems, that I attack people randomly or something.
	And Nigel Farage came out and said, yeah, well, it's been a real problem and he's been really attacking everyone around us.
	And we've been trying to keep it from the public, but you know how it is.
	And that seemed like a massive crock of S.
	And then it turned out that the very allegations against Rupert Lowe themselves started evaporating into the air like total wind.
	It turns out that the bullying allegations were actually not against Rupert himself, but his office.
	So why are we suspending him?
	Why are we blaming him?
	And then Reform said, no, even if there turns out to be nothing, we're not having him back.
	So clearly, this was just a politically motivated hit job and character assassination.
	And in response to this, people who have known Rupert Lowe for decades, including his own staff that were supposed to be the ones leveling the allegations against his office, came out and said, no, Rupert has done nothing wrong.
	He's a really good guy.
	He's a complete teddy bear.
	He's been a gentleman and has acted honorably with everyone around him.
	And we all like working for him.
	And suddenly, you can see how this looks like a rake that the Farage party and reform have stepped on and it's smacked in their own face.
	Because suddenly people started coming out of the woodwork and saying, yeah, no, Nigel Farage did this to me too.
	And me and me.
	And it turns out there's more than a dozen people that Nigel Farage has stepped on in his career to get further and further ahead without any kind of remorse.
	And so he's left a trail of broken political careers in his wake to get to where he is.
	And he thought he'd just be able to do the same thing again with Rupert Lowe.
	In my case, I came in in 2014.
	By 2016, people wanted me to take over as the new leader of UKIP.
	And only then were kind of the political dogs of war unleashed on me with false accusations I'd committed offences, false accusations that I was with various people despite being married.
	All of these were fed to the press to undermine me.
	And that led, unfortunately, to the massive row that occurred in the European Parliament that led to the injuries that led me to leave the party.
	But I wasn't the first.
	You see what he's using against Rupert Lowe at the moment.
	But his problem is Rupert Lowe is the person in reform who is diligent, who is well-liked, who has done the hard work, who is telling the truth, and who, frankly, seems to be honestly, and this was Dan's formulation, boomer Jesus.
	Rupert Lowe gives his salary to charity.
	When the BBC went and investigated In Great Yarmouth, they found nothing but people saying glowing praise, saying, oh yeah, he's the one MP who's actually got something done for me around here.
	And so this seems like a really bad mistake, doesn't it?
	Your political biography is strewn with roadside political corpses, people you've fallen out with.
	I didn't fall out with anybody.
	I just get on and do what I do.
	They fall out with me.
	So after all of the people who came out and gave testimonials about Rupert came out in support of him, and then all of the people Nigel Farage has hurt over the years came out and gave their testimonials about their experiences with Nigel.
	It's not a surprise that you get posts like this from Leilani who say, oh, right, I was wrong about Nigel.
	I was wrong.
	I didn't understand why he was so difficult to deal with.
	I didn't understand why he kept throwing people I like under the bus.
	I didn't understand why he would never spend any amount of time with alternative media.
	He would never talk to any activists.
	He would never go outside of his very tightly knit circle of sycophants.
	And now you know, it turns out Nigel was not the man that we thought he was.
	And after this, Nigel did an interview with Channel 4, a little mini documentary.
	And man, did he say some strange things?
	I'm not a populist.
	I've heard you call yourself a populist.
	I realized I'm not.
	I realized.
	This was last week you called yourself a populist.
	I am not.
	I am not a populist.
	So yeah, it seems that we were all wrong about Nigel Farage.
	And Nigel Farage seems to be the one telling us that we were all wrong.
	He's not the populist right-winger we thought that he was.
	He's not actually interested in helping the people of Britain.
	What it seems to be is that he's interested in creating a kind of political fife for himself in which he is the absolute lord and sovereign and everyone else can shut their mouths or get thrown under the bus.
	But alas, everyone says, if it wasn't for Nigel Farage, reform would be nowhere.
	And the thing is, Ben Habib rightly pointed out the other day, that's not true.
	It was because reform was doing well that Nigel came back.
	You might not remember, but in June last year, before Nigel Farage had rejoined, reform was up to 17% in the polls because everyone hated Keir Starmer and his Labour Party and they hated the Conservative Party and they wanted a third option.
	And Richard Tys's reform was pretty much the only game in town at that point.
	And it was only when the polls came out of Clacton, showing it on about 35% as in it was going to be a reform win for the candidate who was going to stand in Clacton that Nigel Farage parachuted himself back in, took Clacton as the constituency he was going to run in, throw out under the bus whoever that guy was.
	I can't even remember.
	I'm really sorry for that chap for not being able to remember your name off the top of my head and installed himself because it was a guaranteed win.
	Nigel didn't do the canvassing in there.
	He didn't go down to Clackton and say, right, come on, guys, we can do this.
	He didn't flip that constituency.
	He parachuted himself in because he knew it was going to be successful.
	And it was.
	So when everyone says, oh, well, if it wasn't Farage, they wouldn't have any MPs.
	No, it's the other way around.
	They were going to have MPs, which is why Farage was back, which is why Rupert Lowe won where he won as well.
	That's not the Farage effect.
	That's the, we hate the main parties and we want an alternative effect.
	And so when people say, well, reform is just the Nigel Farage party, well, have you asked reform members about that?
	Because they don't think so.
	There was a YouGov poll that came out today that showed that actually only about one third of reform voters and members are actually Nigel Farage diehards.
	Another third don't think it really makes that much of a difference who's in charge of the party.
	And another third think the party would be doing even better if they didn't have Nigel Farage as the leader.
	And to be honest with you, they might be right.
	Why hasn't reform cracked more than 25% in the polls on average now?
	It's actually hard to say, considering how unpopular Labour and the Conservatives are.
	It could be that Farage himself is acting as a hard cap, not only due to the fact that, okay, only one man's personal brand can only go so far, but his absolute refusal to build a coalition and bring in those other people in the same way that Trump brought in RFK, Tulsi, Kash Patel and others, to bring in people who wouldn't naturally be with Trump, but because that guy is with him and we like that guy, we're going over to him.
	Reform could be much higher if Nigel Farage was actually able to build the coalition, and it might be he's the thing that's holding it back.
	And it's important to note as well that 90% of reform members did not want Rupert Lowe kicked out.
	This is not a popular decision.
	And you can see by just looking at any of their Twitter feeds at the moment, they are, as far as they're concerned, battening down the hatches and trying to weather the storm.
	But people are really pissed off about this.
	This seems to have actually kicked off a proper firestorm.
	And so now Nigel Farage is out in the media trying to defend himself, saying, well, I didn't want this.
	This wasn't something I was looking for.
	It's like, okay, but why did you, why did you make it happen?
	You're the ones who made this happen.
	You sat on the allegations until it was convenient to then try and bam, shoot Rupert Lowe out behind the shed.
	But it turns out that actually his record was actually completely unblemished.
	There was nothing that you could do character-wise to destroy him, which is the worst, meanest girl type of way of dealing with something.
	If you just said, look, we just don't want you here, get out.
	That would have at least been more understandable.
	But being a total bitch about it, come on, man.
	But then that didn't work.
	And so now you say, oh, well, I just want to get past it.
	I just want to move on.
	This is a distraction that I don't need.
	Well, you created this for yourself.
	You did this.
	No one else did this to you.
	And so now we're in a position where Rupert Lowe is going to fight this to the bitter end because it's his name.
	It's his good name that's on the line.
	He's done nothing wrong.
	You thought you could just steamroll him like you did everyone else in the past.
	But actually, it turns out that Rupert Lowe is already an MP, so you can't change that.
	Doesn't need your money, so you've got no way of controlling him.
	And actually wants to do the right thing.
	Not just by himself or by others, but by the country.
	And so now you have created a man who did nothing wrong, has now got a huge amount of public backing because everyone is on his side, not yours, Nigel, by the way, just in case you hadn't noticed, and actually may find himself in the position you wanted to be in, because it turns out that Elon Musk has said, well, if Rupert Lowe wants to start a party, I might give him backing, according to the Financial Times.
	Who knows where that goes?
	The worst case scenario is that Rupert Lowe is subsumed into the arcane machinery of the Conservative Party and essentially disappears off of the face of frontline politics.
	But the best case scenario, at least for people who care about the country, is that he takes Ben Habib up on that offer.
	He takes Elon Musk up on those offers.
	And he says, yeah, you know what?
	We are going to start a party.
	And instead of Nigel Farage's fragile ivory tower, it's going to follow the Trumpian mold of being a robust big tent that is actually for everyone.
	And we are actually going to stand on the point of principle because at this point, Rupert Lowe has walked back nothing.
	He has embraced fully the, no, I'm right.
	I'm doing the right thing for the right reasons and I'm saying the right message and I'm standing on this and I'm not going to bend in the face of the media, in face of the smears, in face of my own party trying to destroy me.
	Man, that is admirable.
	That is goddamn admirable.
	And I'm not surprised.
	Elon Musk saw through Nigel Farage instantly.
	He was like, no, he's not the guy.
	This Rupert Lowe guy, I like the cut of his jib.
	Like everyone else, I've had to bite my tongue over Nigel Farage and be like, oh, God, okay, fine.
	We'll just let him do this, let him do that.
	Maybe he'll understand why he needs other people's help moving forward.
	And everyone would say, well, look, he's the only game in town and it's either this or nothing.
	It's like, yeah, okay.
	But what if he's not the only game in town?
	What if there is something else that is actually credible, that would start with an MP, that would start in Parliament, that would have a fighting chance because it would have lots of good and capable people behind it.
	What if there was something else?
	So suddenly the gloves can come off.
	Suddenly we can actually say, no, we can actually get something done that is ours and not theirs, not in some way compromised.
	And I've got to say, it felt pretty good watching Rupert Lowe sauntering into Parliament today behind Richard Tice and Lee Anderson, who couldn't even bear to turn and look at him.
	They knew they were the ones in the wrong.
	They knew they'd stitched him up.
	They knew he had done nothing wrong and so did he.
	Oh, this did not go the way that you thought it was going to go, did it, Richard?
	Did it, Isabel?
	Did it Nigel?
	Did it Zia?
	This is something you did to a good man who didn't deserve it because you are spiteful and callous people.
	And this doesn't last forever.
	Sooner or later, like the ghosts of Christmas past, these people come back.
	And you are now reaping what you've sowed.
	In the same way that Rupert Lowe is reaping what he sowed.
	And what does his crop look like?
	What does his fruit look like?
	His fruit is people coming out and saying, no, this is a great guy and we're not having this.
	Yours is, these are the knives in my back put there by Nigel Farage.
	Anyway, thank you for watching, folks.
	If you'd like to support me, go down, follow the link in the description, get the latest edition of Islander.
	It's only going to be another week and a half that it's available for and then it will be gone forever.
	If the first and second editions are anything to go by, there's going to be a huge amount of regret over not getting this third one because this is the one in which I've done the translation and essay for The Wanderer among many other essays.

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